Fine Point Pencil Artist
Biography
Sarah Ort is an artist from New Jersey who got her Bachelor of Fine Arts at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2022. Throughout her undergraduate career, she developed a practice with active imagination, automatic drawing, and therapeutic approaches to art making. She utilizes intuition to guide her work through countless imagined landscapes—forests of psychological data and oceans deepened by innate body wisdom.
Her work is about building one's internal capacity to love, feed, hold, and forgive. This is an idea she learned from her work as an infant teacher. The bond between a child and a caregiver taught her what love can overcome, what it can give, and how it builds a person. It also inspired her to work in early intervention with art and other creative activities.
She is currently a graduate student of Art Therapy at George Washington University.
My work explores both internal reactions and external systems. The sources of these images emerge from dreams, meditations, and intuitive insights. My fascination with the formal aspects of art making—such as value and contrast—drives me to define each shape. The resulting artworks often exude a sense of whimsical intensity, in which playful shapes are weighted by deep shadows. I find it reflects the energy of my generation---a yearning for playfulness and exploration balanced by the anxiety of uncertain times. As a queer person, my work serves to both soothe and understand my experiences, and reach a sense of interconnectedness. We so often forget our common humanity, but art visualizes the shared undercurrent of wonder, and at its core, holds life in reverence.